Got Lice? Hold the Mayo—and Pesticides!
Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff
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If you have a child in school, chances are he or she will get lice at some point or another. You can be the most vigilant hair-washer on the planet, your kid could practically squeak and sparkle, but one day you'll look over and she'll be scratchy-scratching at her head.
I know, because two weeks ago my daughter came home with lice.
Now this is not entirely surprising. She has (had) long hair down to her waist and so thick that it took 15 minutes to brush out every morning. (Prompting a daily discussion about how kids with cancer need wigs and how much good karma cutting 10 inches off her mane could do and how cute she'd look with a bob, all to no avail.) And despite the tightness of my braiding, the firmness of my pony tailing and the sternness with which I lectured that she'd get lice if she didn't keep her hair back, she always came home with it loose. Hey, if you had hair like Brooke Shields in that desert island movie, you'd probably want to let it fly, too.
But loose hair is like a highway to heaven for lice. They hop and crawl from one child's head to another, a practice made especially easy when said child's hair is flying around all over the place.
So she scratched. And I looked. And then I checked the Internet for photos and descriptions. Sure enough, those little yellowish dots were lice eggs. Then I freaked, remembering my sister-in-law's 12-month battle against the things, in which she enlisted old standards like mayonnaise and petroleum jelly in an effort to avoid pesticides. Nothing worked. And taking her advice to heart, my whole Mommy Greenest persona went out the window as I screamed at my husband to hit the 24-hour drugstore and bring us back the biggest vat of Rid he could find.
Now if you've never encountered Rid before, you're lucky. It doesn't exactly burn, but it certainly smells like it should. And the active ingredient that kills the lice--piperonyl butoxide--is at what they call a "low hazard" for cancer and reproductive toxicity, according to the Skin Deep database (part of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, which is awesome, if you haven't checked it out already). The report also shows a 70% data gap in testing, which may be accounted for by the fact that this stuff's been on the market for eons and probably hasn't been tested since our grandparents used it on our parents. This also might mean that its dangers are currently under-reported, because it sure as h*ll smells like it's more toxic than that.
But did this knowledge of toxicity stop me from slapping the shampoo on my daughter's scalp? Not for a New York minute. Although they are small and relatively innocuous, the idea of lice is just skin-crawlingly horrifying enough to take your eco high-and-mightiness on vacation. My head itches just writing about it.
So I vigorously shampooed my daughter, my son, and the Barnacle with Rid. And when I checked again and saw that the shampoo hadn't killed the lice but had, in some weird Wes-Craven-inspired parenting scenario, caused the eggs to hatch so that tiny, newborn lice were actually crawling, drunk with Rid poison, on their scalps, what did I do? I shampooed them again. Longer.
But here's the thing about lice: Once the live ones die (and they finally did, thankfully), you have to get the eggs out. If you don't get every single little nit and one teeny tiny bug hatches one to two weeks later it can spawn seven to 10 eggs in a day and you're right back where you started. And that's about two hours with the nit comb if your child has (had) a mane like my daughter's, where you go through the hair strand by strand and pull the sticky little eggs all the way down the shaft, then drown them in vinegar before you flush 'em. Think about doing that to 10 inches of hair all the way around.
So our session with the nit comb concluded with a visit to the hairdresser's, where my daughter walked out with a brand new, absolutely adorable bob and I walked out with the answer to my prayers: An all-natural, pesticide-free kids' hair care line developed to combat lice. The stuff is called Fairy Tales and it's primarily formulated with rosemary and citronella essential oils, which are lice repellents. Then there's a treatment mousse that utilizes enzymes to combat infestations, a daily shampoo (containing sodium laureth, yes, but it's a far cry from piperonyl butoxide), and my absolute favorite Rosemary Repel Spray and Shield, which is this yummy, essential-oil smelling stuff that you spritz on like hair spray, and it prevents the lice from taking a ride to your kids' scalps.
Eureka! Lice is currently all over their school but my kids are not repeat offenders.
Score one for Mommy Greenest, zero for Rid.
POSTSCRIPT
And so the war continues. Now, apparently, it's my 10-year-old son's turn to bring pests home. My close-lipped, typically tweenage son who can barely tell me what he did all day, let alone let on when his head itches.
And here's the kicker: He's blonde.
Now if you've ever dealt with lice, you know what that means. Nits happen to be the exact shade of yellow-dare I say, blonde-as your child's hair.
But having been through this once before with the brunette, I knew my weapon of choice. No, I didn't repeatedly douse my three children's heads with Rid-though I have to admit, I was tempted.
Although I did shampoo him with Fairy Tales to kill the critters that I saw crawling on my son's scalp (plus the rest of the family, proactively), I then got to work with a more natural arsenal: A bottle of tea tree oil, and a fine toothed comb. Every morning for the past three days, I rub tea tree oil on my palms with a little water, then run my fingers around their hairlines-concentrating on the back of the neck and around the ears-to dissuade any stray bugs from trying to take up residence.
And each afternoon I wash their hair with regular shampoo, then sit them down in strong light to go through their hair strand by strand. I haven't found any nits in my daughter's dark brown hair, and I'm praying that the quick check of the wiggly Barnacle is thorough enough to confirm the same absence of wigglers of the insect variety, but each time I examine my son, I find a few more tiny-hopefully dead-eggs, which take about 15 minutes to pick out, one by one.
Ugh. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
I dread this kind of infestation. I go crazy washing all the towels and sheets and hats in the house. But the reality is this: I hole up in the bathroom and my son-who usually ducks his head when I try to kiss him goodbye and will only let me hug him if no one else is looking-actually talks to me as I comb through is nit-masking blonde hair.
Yes, gentle readers, I'm using a pest infestation as a means to communicate with my tween. Have I no shame?
I hope that by today, I've got them all. But I'll keep checking in the back-to-school weeks to come. I may not find any more lice, but at least my son and I will have a few days more of decent conversation before the wall of silence goes up again.
For Lice, Check out Our Trusted Partner Robi Comb which offers effective, non-toxic solutions.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of
Healthy Child Healthy World.
